MILITANT INDEX

Socialist Workers Party: Amnesty for immigrants!

No to deportations! Build unity of working class

Sept. 5 actions across country, like in New York above, protest move by President Donald Trump to phase out DACA program that protected many young immigrants from deportation.

The following statement was issued Sept. 5 by Osborne Hart, Socialist Workers Party candidate for mayor of New York.

The Socialist Workers Party encourages working people and youth to join us in actions around the country protesting the government’s plan to phase out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The SWP says “Stop the deportations! Amnesty for all immigrants who are here!” That’s the road to uniting the working class.

Over the last several decades U.S.- and foreign-born working people have gotten to know each other. We work in the same factories and on the same construction sites. Our children go to the same schools. We have all been battered by the capitalist economic crisis and the bosses’ push to make us pay to prop up their dog-eat-dog for-profit system. We face speedup on the job, unsafe working conditions and high unemployment.

They seek to “divide and conquer,” pitting Black against Caucasian, immigrant against native-born, employed against unemployed. We all have a common enemy — the capitalist system of exploitation, war and racial oppression. We need to unite and fight together.

President Donald Trump’s administration says they are passing the ball to Congress, and will phase out DACA over the next two years unless the Democrats and Republicans pass an immigration reform bill that “puts American jobs and American security first.” But there are two Americas — the America of the wealthy, propertied rulers, and the America of the workers and farmers who create all the wealth. Workers and our unions need to say, “We don’t care where you were born, let’s stand up and fight against the bosses together.”

We need to fight to rebuild our unions, to organize the unorganized, to fight for a government-funded public works program that would put the millions of unemployed to work at union-scale wages. A program that would rebuild crumbling infrastructure — from New York’s subways to the dams and water supplies of the West, to the homes destroyed by Hurricane Harvey.

But no fight in the interests of the working class can be won if we are divided. That’s why the fight for amnesty for immigrant workers is a life or death question for the working class.

The DACA program — granting work permits and temporary protection from deportation to some 800,000 people who came to the U.S. as children — was put in place by then-President Barack Obama through an executive order. At the same time, his administration deported hundreds of thousands of undocumented workers. Obama jailed more workers on so-called immigration violations than any other president in U.S. history.

As we fight against the propertied rulers’ attacks on our class, working people need our own party, a party like the SWP, to organize to take political power out of their hands.

Deportations are not popular with working people. There is less anti-immigrant sentiment and less racism among working people than at any time in U.S. history.

That means we are in a stronger position to advance the interests of the working class. Join us in this fight! No deportations! Amnesty now!